Last November we showcased how the Visual Channel Comparer can be used to visually compare the coverage of television news channels side-by-side during major news events. Let's use that same workflow to compare how CNN, MSNBC and Fox News covered Trump's arraignment this past Tuesday. For those that just want to see the final results, the montages can be downloaded below. Each covers a 3 hour period with one row of images every 32 seconds:
- 8PM EST 4/3 – 11PM EST 4/4
- 11PM EST 4/3 – 2AM EST 4/4
- 2AM EST – 5AM EST 4/4
- 5AM EST – 8AM EST 4/4
- 8AM EST – 11AM EST 4/4
- 11AM EST – 2PM EST 4/4
- 2PM EST – 5PM EST 4/4
- 5PM EST – 7PM EST 4/4
The collages can be freely used in any media coverage, commentary, etc – please credit them as "Data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive processed by the GDELT Project."
You can see the code used to generate them below (the tool uses UTC timestamps):
#install the libraries we need... apt-get -y install imagemagick apt-get -y install parallel #download the comparer script... wget https://storage.googleapis.com/data.gdeltproject.org/blog/2022-tv-news-visual-explorer/vechancompare.pl chmod 755 vechancompare.pl #generate the montages time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404000000 20230404030000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040400-2023040403.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404030000 20230404060000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040403-2023040406.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404060000 20230404090000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040406-2023040409.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404090000 20230404120000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040409-2023040412.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404120000 20230404150000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040412-2023040415.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404150000 20230404180000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040415-2023040418.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404180000 20230404210000 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040418-2023040421.jpg time ./vechancompare.pl 20230404210000 20230404235959 CNN,MSNBC,FOXNEWS 300x175 32 && mv MONTAGE.jpg montage-cnnmsnbcfox-2023040421-2023040424.jpg
This analysis is part of an ongoing collaboration between the Internet Archive and its TV News Archive, the multi-party Media-Data Research Consortium and GDELT.